How to win a fight with your partner

Letter to my younger self #9

I write this off the back of a fight with my wife.

Well, not really a fight. It was more-so just a spirited discussion. 😆

We were talking about a movie called Emilia Pérez, which won a golden globe last week. It’s also a movie that’s been highly criticized here in Mexico because it reinforces problematic stereotypes, and has a lack of Mexican representation in the cast. There’s many other reasons—trust me—but for now that’s just a taste.

I told my wife I wanted to see the movie.

She didn’t like that.

We then spent 10 minutes talking past each other about how you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, and how the Golden Globes typically pick truly great movies to win awards. She talked to me about how making a musical about 400,000+ deaths from cartel violence seems in very poor taste. One thing I’ve learned about my wife is that there’s no changing her mind once her voice reaches a certain decibel level.

On one hand I really love that about her. She’s strong, and opinionated, and has a rebel spirit about her that we need in this world. I don’t envy anybody who gets caught in her crosshairs. On the other hand, it can be futile to engage with her in that state because she won’t budge on anything.

It doesn’t matter how much I push, or reason, she won’t come around.

Now. I don’t blame her. That’s who she is and I know I’m not going to change her. I can be just as stubborn sometimes, so it’s all good. What I want to focus on today is how, after nearly 2 years of marriage, I’ve gotten really good at the “live and let live” part of all this. In the past, I felt I could win her over to my side because that’s what I do for a living. I write shit, and argue my point, and try to get the audience to agree with me. I’m not Socrates, but I do think I’m pretty decent at this.

With my wife this doesn’t always fly. I am shockingly powerless against the solid concrete wall that is my wife’s stubbornness sometimes. In the past I’d get annoyed at that. I’d leave the room, or give her the silent treatment, or just stonewall—all fantastic things to do in a relationship, I know. But now I sort of just accept it.

One thing that changed everything is I realized there’s some topics that are too emotionally charged for her to back down on. I know that challenging her on these topics is like fighting uphill during a snowstorm while carrying a 100 pound rucksack.

Thankfully, though, these topics have zero effect on our relationship, so I can just let the fight die out and we can carry on like normal.

Sometimes I feel there’s this desire to have a fight with your partner. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like how humans seem to have this innate desire for conflict, which explains all the, you know, war. Sometimes I feel we just decide after 2-4 weeks of ceasefire that it’s time to lock and load and get our blood pumping again. You know, get some excitement going and stuff. I’ve come to laugh about how reliable this really is in our relationship, and it takes the sting out of the fighting for me.

The second shift that’s changed everything is how much I see the human behind the concrete wall. There’s some things that really make my wife angry because, well, injustice does that to people! I can understand that. She gets upset when people blame Mexico—and Mexicans—for stupid crap. She gets upset when anybody mistreats her country or culture in any way, and I get that, too.

After being with her for almost four years, I know where the landmines are. I also know that when she’s upset about something seemingly innocuous, it’s really about something else. Empathy—both in the moment and in general—has really helped me navigate our conflicts better.

A third shift I’ve had is that I realize how much I can learn from my wife. I love traveling—you all know that—and part of traveling is coming face-to-face with new perspectives. Even when we’re fighting, I sometimes sit back and go “Wow, she actually made a really good point there.”

Now, a fourth shift I’ve had is that I realize we share a common goal. We want to see less injustice in the world. We want people who are suffering to not suffer anymore. That’s a common target we’re both shooting for, and when you strip the talking points down to their bare bones, you realize this is just a person who wants to see less injustice in the world. I can get behind that.

I titled this post “How To Win A Fight With Your Partner.”

Spoilers: Winning a fight is not actually about getting the upper hand in an argument. It’s about having a fight and being able to walk away and say “I love you” to each other two minutes after.

That’s winning for me. I remember this quote from Neville Chamberlain, “In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.”

Fighting can kind of be like war sometimes. Now, I do think some fights are absolutely necessary to improve the marriage. If I have a real problem, we can talk about it just fine most of the time. But there’s also so many fights that don’t matter, you know? I think that’s common in a relationship, and I’m talking more-so about those kinds of fights in this article.

I want to end this article by giving my wife some credit here. You might think she’s some stone wall of a person because of what I’ve written so far. No, that’s not true. She’s changed a lot since I met her, and she is very affectionate with me 99.9% of the time. She just nukes me with love every day, which is really nice.

I think when we talk about fighting in a relationship, we focus a lot on the actual fighting part of it. I’ve found that the sweetest moments actually happen after the fighting. An apology from someone. An extension of an olive branch. A “You know what? You were right about that.” It’s funny how efficient we are at changing our minds after all the fighting is done. Fighting can be like a wildfire. There’s destruction and ruin, but a wildfire can also destroy what was to make way for new things to come. It can level a forest to create space for new plants to grow.

The germination always happens after the wildfire, of course, and I feel like it’s the same way with fighting. In the middle of it we get defensive and upset, but afterwards the seeds start to germinate, and we can end up changing our minds on our own.

I guess that means the other person won, eh?